On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 3:39 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 1/12/2015 8:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > Atheism is a variant of christiniaty, because for non atheist non > christian, "God", like any term in a theory, is defined by axioms or > semi-axioms indeed. > > > I suppose by "semi-axioms" you mean definitions by description, like > "ground of all being" or "creator of the universe" or "that of which we > cannot speak" - which are used to define "God" by Christian theologians > too. But I'll bet you $100 that if we pick a person at random who is > neither a Christian nor an atheist and ask him if "God" refers to a > superpowerful, immortal person who judges human behavior he'll say "Yes". > That stars weren't holes in the celestial sphere didn't mean stars didn't exist, it meant we had to update our conception of what stars are. That Earth wasn't flat didn't lead to people denying the existence of Earth or throwing out the word altogether, it meant we had to update our conception of the Earth to something more like a ball. Two people might both say they believe in Quantum Mechanics, but yet they might have very different ideas about what that means. Person A might mean they believe in the Everettian view, while Person B might believe in the Copenhagen view. Such it is with the concept of God. That some, or even most people's conception is faulty is not justification to throw out the term. It means only that there is room for progress to better approximate reality with our conception. Furthermore, the possibility for the same word to mean different things to different people make a word useless. As we see with the various interpretations of QM, there is common-root meaning, and minimum set of ideas commonly held ideas, even if they aren't exactly the same. You may find some particular tribe's conception of God to be ridiculous and unworthy of acceptance, but to reject the notion of God altogether on this account alone would be like rejecting the ground you walk on because flat-Earthers are mistaken about that ground's geometry. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
